The Cradle That Stood Beside the Cake

That baby was going to have two grandmothers for the rest of its life. It was going to have us at every birthday and every Christmas program and, Lord willing, a wedding. I was not going to start all of that with a fight over a lunch.

Eighty-five dollars was a day’s work. A feud was going to cost a good deal more than that, and somebody else’s child would be paying on it.

So I got out the checkbook.

I wrote it for the full eighty-five. On the memo line I wrote “place setting, with thanks,” because my mother raised me to say thank you when someone feeds me, whoever ends up paying for it. I put it in one of my own plain envelopes with a note that said I was looking forward to the day and that the invitation was beautiful, which it was.

Then I walked it back out to the mailbox and put the flag up, and I did not tell a soul.

I did not tell Josh. I did not tell the girls at work, and those girls know when I have a hangnail.

I did not tell Earl.

That one was the hardest, and I had a particular reason for it. My husband was out in the garage that very minute, and had been every evening since the day after Christmas, building that baby a cradle.

If Earl had known about the card, he would not have said a cross word to anyone. He is not made that way. He would have just gone a little quiet out there. He would have stood at his bench thinking about a woman who sends an invoice, and wondering whether a thing made in a garage by a man in a canvas coat belonged in a country club at all.

I was not going to have that. Not one evening of it.

So I kept it. It was my eighty-five dollars to keep quiet about, and I kept quiet.

Now I have to tell you about the cradle, because the cradle is the rest of the story.

Earl is a carpenter. I do not mean he is handy. I mean he has hung doors and built stairs and trimmed out other people’s houses for forty years, and his knees and his thumbs will tell you so. The fine work he does for himself, in the evenings, in a two-car garage with a kerosene heater and a radio.

On Christmas night, after Josh and Ashley drove home, he sat at the table a long time with a pencil and the back of a feed store calendar.

“I’m going to build that baby something,” he said.

“I figured you were,” I said.

He bought the cherry the first week of January from a man with a bandsaw mill outside Allegan. Rough boards, air dried four years, a little over two hundred forty dollars’ worth. He let them sit in the garage ten days before he would cut one, so the wood could get used to the place. He says wood moves and you have to let it, and a man who rushes it ends up with a drawer that sticks every August.

After that it was every night.